Fragments of 18th-century wine bottle found decades apart now back together in South Carolina

CHARLESTON, S.C. – More than 42 years ago in this historic city, an archaeologist found a piece of a rare wine bottle seal left behind by early British colonists.

Twenty six years later, another archaeologist coincidently visited the same area and discovered a similar fragment of a seal with a name inscribed.

Nearly 300 years after the seal was designed, those two fragments from what turned out to be the same bottle have been finally been reunited — a breakthrough that archaeologists call historic and a “miracle.”

“Holy Cow! It’s kind of an archaeological miracle that that happened,” Syracuse doctoral candidate Sarah Platt said. “It’s not often that we find those kinds of pieces so far apart and that they were excavated by two separate archaeologists, 30 years apart.”